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Book 1: Prelude
“Every story has a beginning, yet every beginning is different; for every story is different.” said the voice in the darkness. The sleeping boy stirred and turned over but did not waken. “To begin, one must have a knowing. To know, one must have seeing. And so few of you can really see.” The boy’s eyes remained half shut as sleepers’ will, so that the objects of the room melded with his dreams and flowed into fantastic and ponderous meanings. And still the voice in the darkness wandered through his dreams, and through a thousand confused worlds the boy still heard him speak. “They grope in the darkness and think that they are seeing, and wander in a fog of their own constant thinking. The shape, the form, the nature of reality. Is the world as it seems? Does it run on ancient laws that are rigidly obeyed? Was it always as it now is?” The boy stared in his sleeping vision at the ominous shape of the window and the summer night outside it. Stars began to gleam in it, first one and then another and then the dark was bright with silver lights. He watched, enchanted even in slumber, and the stars stood and laughed at him as he stood beside the water, strange cold merry laughter that pricked him like chill breezes, their silver figures hard and prickly with rays, dancing on the mirror-like surface as though the lake were made of glass. “They say that all is relative.” the voice said from the air and out of the tree at his side. The solid island seemed to waver, as if its’ very nature was shifting. “They say the world has always been like this, dead and shifting and bereft of all magic. What was it in truth, Forest?” And even in his dreaming state confusion came upon him. “The beginning is known. The ending is known, for we walk onward toward it and it is nigh beneath our feet. But it is not known of the transition.” The boy wanted to speak but his throat refused to work. “The roads that walk the heavens, and the roads that go to earth. The world that once was is as far from the world that is, as the stars are far from the land from which men see them.” The boy tossed and turned. The room was hot, smothering. The shapes of real things began to shed their portentous meanings, slipping down to resume their normal proportion. “Beginnings never begin.” the voice said distantly as it slid down into the dreams he was leaving. “They merely continue.” PRELUDE The stars looked down on Winsted. They spread over the deep blue of the ancient dome, hard and clear and white, walking up the heavens overhead. The orange dullness of the streetlights met the ancient blue at the hem of the trees and produced a weird, black region where was no light at all. And still the stars looked down on Winsted, and the little town reposed in the horseshoe-shaped valley, blissfully unaware of the scrutiny. The storefronts were lit, even the ones like the antique shops that were closed, a single wall of close-built store buildings divided by narrow alleys and bared stairs, stores on the bottom and apartments above. Restaurants glowed and the big white sign above the old-fashioned cinema halfway down Main St shed a comforting light on the people exiting the purple-lit doors. In blue neon letters atop the sign GILSON’S announced its’ name to Winsted. The 7:00 movie was over and there was a whole night’s worth of other things to see and enjoy, and the couples and young people and lone middle-aged men headed up the street to the dim bars. Neon signs in red and blue announced their wares, the two colors in such proximity giving an eerie impression of purple. None of the walkers looked up so much as once at the ancient places overhead, but then it was doubtful they would have seen much, anyway. The lampposts along Main St were shedding a white auroa from their globe-shaped lamps, and the glare of moving white from passing cars blended with the orange higher up. The world seemed to end at the rooftops, and Winsted glittered under its’ canopy of manufactured light and bustled on, as always. Tall and silent above the streetlights St. Joseph’s rose, the front illumined by a single lamp facing backward on a streetlight pole, but the pinnacles of peak and chimney and great steeple soared into darkness, hardly to be seen. The fields below in the river flats were flooded white: a late baseball game was winding down, and parents hollered and bats cracked, and above them was only a roof of ink: no star could see into that glare. The cemetery on its’ queer hill behind the park was invisible, asleep under its’ scattered pines. Behind the close-set wall of nightlit shops the little city was settling down. The rising banks of house-lights on either wall of the valley were dimming as lights were turned off. The horseshoe valley swept in a square curve, horns facing north, Mad River and Main Street following the curve. Where the valley turned east after the first bend, it opened into a broad level a half-mile wide, known once as The Flat but now just the inner city. There apartment windows glowed in high old houses, and people dark as the dusk around them clustered upon the steps and porches of ancient tenements. Higher up the houses grew more pleasing, the yards were tended and trees grew in them, the green overlaid by the dull orange of the sad lamps. Up the skirts of the climbing hills the houses rose, street above street, row of orange above row of orange. Black and quiet above them rose the hills, unhaunted by lights save for the climbing threads of streetlights along major roads. Above the town the ancient lake lay mirror-calm, free at last of the boats that beset it by day, that filled it with waves like a small but unquiet sea. Long and winding, it twisted through the tops of the hills like a floor of black crystal, the reflection from the houses gleaming like gems far down inside. And the stars gleamed above them, and the stars looked down on Winsted, and brightest of all they looked down upon that lake. It felt as if other eyes than the stars were gazing on that lake, watching it, eyes older than the trees or even than the hills beneath the trees. But the night was empty, and darkness walked where the lights of men did not fall, and the darkness was silent.